[earlyadopter]

OK, so finally last night I received notification that my 64GB SSD has shipped from MDD. Yay.

First and foremost, I want to test the thing thoroughly so that I know it works. So any advice on how to do that would be appreciated.

I'll start with a little prep on the XP Home software currently on the 16GB SSD. I'll use XPLITE to trim off all components that I don't need. I'll use the disk cleanup feature to delete the temporary files that I don't need or want.

Then I will use Norton Ghost 14.0 to create an image. I will most likely put this on a clean USB stick, but I may cut a DVD-ROM instead. How big will a ~6GB XP installation become when converted to a Ghost Image? Are there strong drawbacks to either media type?

Next, I'll shut down, remove the battery, pop out the old drive and insert the new one. Upon power-up, I will install the OS from the image.

After that, I should be good to go, except for the testing of the entire 64GB SSD. Any suggestions as to what I'm missing in this plan, or how to go about testing the SSD THOROUGHLY, would be greatly appreciated.

[Fanfoot]

I've always just run the disktest function built into windows, i.e. Drive C, Properties, Tools, Error Checking/Check Now and then check the "Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors" box before clicking Start. This will presumably take a while, and require a reboot of your system to run...

Steve Gibson's SpinRite always gets good marks, though I haven't found a need for it myself. And I don't know if it will work on SSD drives. I suspect it won't since I don't see anything in the FAQ...

[UnaClocker]

Do not use spinrite on a SSD! Do not defrag your SSD either. Spinrite writes the heck out of each sector. You could easily cut the life span of the drive down in half in one session. Defrag is bad because the SSD controller purposely fragments the data so that you aren't writing to the same cell in the ssd over and over, it's called "wear leveling". Since you're going to have a ghosted image of your install, just start using the SSD and see how it works out. You have a 1 year warranty on the thing, don't sweat it.

[Fanfoot]

Una--sounds like you're right about spinright being a bad idea, but I can't imagine how it would cut your SSD drive's lifetime in half. The write cycles per cell for flash is usually in the range of 1,000,000 to 5,000,000 cycles or so and even if spinright did a bunch of writes per "sector" and there were a bunch of sectors in a "cell" (or block, or whatever the minimum write size is on an SSD) so that was effectively multiplied, I don't think you'd be in the hundreds of thousands of writes.

No?

[tjweed]

I am about to do the same so am anxious to hear how it works out for you.
Per http://jkkmobile.blogspot.com/2008/0...ll-mini-9.html
it appears that you want to format your drive as FAT32 instead of NTFS.
If you wish to get beyond the XP imposed 32gig limit for FAT32 partitions please read:
http://www.petri.co.il/install_windo...partitions.htm
You can download a reliable ISO to make a win98 boot CD here:
http://www.bootdisks.us/windows-98/1...cd-images.html
--
Within the original jkkmobile discussion it was mentioned that exfat might be an option in order to get around FAT32's annoying 4gig file limit.
Getting XP SP3 to recognize exfat partitions is easy enough http://www.merawindows.com/Forums/ta...s/Default.aspx except that you can't actually format the drive as exfat via xp.
Please anyone out there see exactly how the pieces to the puzzle might fit together: given a Vista Install CD to format the drive, then restore a disk image of a exfat patched version of XP to that drive? Does this make sense in order to have the main drive exfat with winxp sp3? Possible? Good idea?
Thanks kindly

[earlyadopter]

I will definitely report my successes and barriers. Thanks for the input so far! I will be doing the install most likely next Thursday evening.

[abraxus]

I would be interested to hear of your experience with this as I have just installed a 64gg SSD and am pretty disappointed and will probably return it.

Taking out the old drive and installing the new was a breeze and took less than 5 minutes. I had my XP Pro Media Centre edition all set up on the standard 8gb drive and ghosted an image of this onto the new drive using a usb cd/dvd drive and a usb hard drive with the image on. This went ok, so far so good.

The problem I found was the performance of the 64gb, it was painfully slow to the point of being unusable in my opinion. Th stock drive took about 45 seconds to a minute to boot up and load all my apps whereas the new drive took around 5 mins before it was ready to use. Now as I don't reboot that often I could have lived with this but the speed of opening apps and browser tabs was painful.

I'd be keen to know if it works any better for you and if you're able to get better performance out of the new drive.

[Fanfoot]

If this is a MyDigitalDiscount SSD, and I assume it is, the common wisdom seems to be that you don't want to format it as NTFS, because for whatever reason that compounds the slowness and that if you format it as FAT32, it will work better. There may be issues getting Windows XP to format larger drives as FAT32, but I can't remember what they were or how you work around them. Suggest you follow up on the threads on jkkmobile on this subject, like:

http://jkkmobile.blogspot.com/2008/0...ll-mini-9.html

[abraxus]

I've heard that but I use mine to play 720p hi-def movie files files which are over 4gb and I believe fat32 has a problem with that.

[Fanfoot]

Yes, fat32 won't go over 4GB. No way around it.

Sounds like the ntfs issue is due to the performance of these particular mdd drives, in particular the write performance, which is lower than for the STECs which Dell formats with ntfs. There are now drives available for the mini from MDD that have better write performance:

http://www.mydigitaldiscount.com/Cat...i+9+PCI-e+SSDs

I presume it will be possible to format these as ntfs without the performance issue seen with the earlier SSDs from MDD.